date: Mon, 08 Mar 1999 14:41:07 +0100 from: Keith Alverson subject: workshop invitation to: keith.alverson@pages.unibe.ch WORKSHOP INVITATION We are writing to invite your participation in a "PAGES-CLIVAR Workshop on Climate Variations of the Last 300 to 1000 Years", to be held in Venice, Italy, November 8-12, 1999. The workshop sponsors include the EC, the US PAGES/CLIVAR Program, IGBP PAGES, WCRP CLIVAR and CNR-ISDGM in Venice. The goals of the workshop are 1) to review recent work, 2) to produce a new state-of-the-art analysis of recent paleoclimate for possible publication in Science or Nature and use by the IPCC, and 3) to produce updated implementation strategies for the PAGES/CLIVAR program. The scientific foci of the meeting will be: o the comparison the different proxy-data records (e.g., coral, ice core, tree ring, sediment, historical documentary, etc. ) to recognize their common messages and differences; to assess recent paleoclimatic change on regional (e.g., tropical Pacific, North Atlantic) to hemispheric scales, o the evaluation of several recently produced continental to hemispheric-scale surface temperature reconstructions (e.g., Overpeck et al., 1997; Mann et al., 1998; Jones, 1998; Briffa et al., 1998), and to possibly update/combine these to provide a new state-of-the-art reconstruction of climate variability for the last 300-600 years, o the comparison and integration of all available paleoclimate data for the last 1000 years to put the anomalously warm 20th century in the context of possible past warm periods (e.g., the Medieval Warm Period), and to determine if the 20th century warmth is truly unprecedented or not, o the comparison of new reconstructions of hypothesized climate forcing (e.g., volcanic, solar, trace gas, aerosol) over the last 300-1000 years, and to compare these forcing time series with reconstructed climate variability to test the possible roles of each forcing o the interaction with the CLIVAR/modelling community to establish a strategy to make the best use of the proxy-data to determine the natural variability of the climate system, validate model simulations and provide an improved database to help detect/attribute man-made climatic change during the present century, o the generation of reconstructions required by modellers to initialize coupled ocean-atmosphere model simulations of the last 150 years - the transient experiments from the end of the pre-industrial period needed to study the impact of greenhouse gas and aerosol concentration increases, o the evaluation of whether the various on-going research projects, when completed, will provide enough information to generate needed improvements to our understanding of global climate variability over the last 300 to 1000 years, o the identification of gaps in current research programs and the establishment of strategies to fill them, The meeting will be run in three parts: - prior to the meeting, participants will be asked to put all available paleoclimate reconstructions and data in a protected Internet location for sharing and intercomparison with all other data to be presented and used at the meeting; all except unpublished data will be made public after the meeting along with new reconstructions generated at the meeting, - the first part of the meeting (¾ two days) will be devoted to the presentation of new original results generated during the last few years, - the participants will then split in working groups to address the specific objectives as defined above. The first purpose of this letter is to get the workshop on your calendar, and get you thinking about the opportunities the gathering will provide, both in terms of the best global array of data (climate and climate forcing)yet assembled for the last 300 to 1000 years, as well as with respect to a truly interdisciplinary gathering of PAGES and CLIVAR scientists. The second purpose of this letter is to ask if you think you can attend or not. Please send an email by April 5th to Keith Alverson (alverson@pages.unibe.ch) to indicate your willingness to attend or not. Funding for this workshop is limited, therefore it would be greatly appreciated if you can make every effort to cover some of your costs from your own sources. Please include in your email a statement as to whether you will require full, partial or zero funding to attend as well as an estimate of your travel costs (roundtrip to Venice). This information will greatly help in the early budgeting for this workshop. A list of invited participants is attached for your reference. We're looking forward to a ground-breaking workshop. Thanks! Sincerely, Jean-Claude Duplessy Jonathan Overpeck (Co-Chairs, PAGES-CLIVAR Working Group) Invited Participants List: Bard France coral Charles USA coral Cole USA coral Gagan Australia coral Juillet-Leclerc France coral Quinn USA coral Tudhope UK coral Boninsegna ARG tree ring Briffa UK tree ring Cook USA tree ring Hughes USA tree ring Jones UK tree ring Schweingruber CH tree ring Johnsen DK ice core Jouzel FR ice core Mosely-Thompson USA ice core Thompson USA ice core White USA ice core Duplessy FR sediments Jansen Norway sediments Keigwin USA sediments Overpeck USA sediments Bradley USA historical Diaz USA historical Pfister CH historical Beer CH forcings Raynaud FR forcings Lean USA forcings Zielinski USA forcings Abe-Ouchi Japan General Battisti USA General Bengtsson G General Berger B General Cane USA General Crowley USA General Joussaume FR General Komen NL General Manabe Japan General Mitchell UK General Rahmstorf G General Rind USA General Sarachik USA General Stocker CH General Trenberth USA General Webster USA General Alverson CH PAGES IPO Zimmerman USA NSF Coleman USA NSF Mooney USA NOAA ______________________________________________________________________________ Keith Alverson, Science Officer e-mail: alverson@pages.unibe.ch PAGES International Project Office Phone: +41 31 312 3133 Bärenplatz 2, CH-3011 Fax: +41 31 312 3168 Bern, Switzerland Internet: http://www.pages.unibe.ch/ ______________________________________________________________________________